about astr
| astr press exists to serve those whom the traditional publishing structures of art, design, and literature have historically excluded. Specializing in zines, chapbooks, and edited volumes, astr press has produced over 9,000 copies of texts from over 50 original titles since January 2023. I design most titles and consult on all of them. I also print, bind, and distro zines across the U.S. All profits are returned to the collaborating artist. |
| Collaborating visually and textually with artists, writers, historians, community organizers, and others, I operate an independent transmedia publishing practice that tethers us to our shared pasts, presents, and futures. |
| astr (astringent) press is an experimental self-publishing project that curates and disperses narratives and histories excluded by the traditional publishing structures of art, design, and literature. astr’s transmedia publishing practice challenges traditional modes of collaboration, creation, and exhibition. acting against historical models of client/contractor, astr enables a collaborative flow where artists, writers, historians, and more act as co-authors. |
hot-copy, preview 01
fall 2026Hot Copy is informed by socially-engaged art and design practices across the 20th century.
Hot Copy builds and disseminates over 75 photomontages across reliefs, prints, zines, and video to capture and project a speculative, queer-inclusive past. In the initial 25 photomontages, men are at work reproducing images of male physique pictorials of the era. Advertisements from the industry journal, Inland Printer, become host to loin-clothed models from the physique pictorial, Tomorrow’s Man. Later photomontages in the series feature an expanded palette of men at work (and play).
ohio against the world
fall 2025this zine was created to highlight the ways we survived the covid-19 pandemic.
shortly following covid’s emergence, we took to the streets for a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the emerging #sayhername movement.
following our vaccinations, the public world held a different kind of structure - defined by anxiety of overcrowded spaces (tied to our fears of contagion mixed with our fears of white supremacist acts of terror in the shootings that seemed to dominate the news cycle every few months), the underresearched effects of covid and long covid, the genocide in Gaza and the Sudan and the Congo, and the re-emergence of donald trump as presidential candidate, and then president elect.
now, we have arrived at a moment when the neoliberal curtain has been pulled back to show its fascist roots, where immigration enforcement works to undo our civil liberties, our melting pot culture, the lies we are told about the u.s. as the democratic center of an otherwise ill governed world.
but in a world governed by necropolitics, or a politics defined by death dealing institutions, moments of crisis seem everlasting.
we have arrived at many ends that require our investment in beginnings, our investment in our abilities to come together & demand a better world and when our demands are not met, the will to build anyway.
info
96 pagescover,
60lb. cover, folded
laserjet print, 4-color
inner,
18lb. text, bond paper
laserjet print, 4-color
edited by
Deja Beamon
design/layout
Mattea Jones and Charlie Lampe
featured contributors
cameron grangertasha lomo
sydney mcsweeney
reg zehner
unearthing - anthology
summer 2025“Unearthing” is as much a verb as it is an evocation that invites us to reconnect with the land and our bodies in a series of essays, poetry, and artworks that range across diverse geographies and diasporic histories.
From retracing Black fugitive pathways across the Missouri River, to imagining a monarch’s return to the now-extinct lakes of the Anahuac, the Unearthing Anthology features the works of ten contributors that offer human and non-human perspectives on place and the disruptive forces of colonial violence and climate disaster. Orienting us towards our broader origins, each work is an exploration of personal and geological histories. It is from this excavation that the Unearthing Anthology emerges.
info
48 pagescover,
67lb. cover, folded
riso-printed, black
inner,
1 20lb. text, bond paper
laserjet print, 4-color
2 40lb. text, drawing paper
laserjet print, black
edited by
Hope-Lian Vinsonfeaturing
Indigo Amaré- rachel j. atakpa
- Noelle Choy
- Corrina Delgado
- José Faus
- Christina Femiano
- Hyejung Kook
- Hùng Lê
- Lisa Maione
- Merry Sun